This Side of Paradise

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New York: Dell Publishing Company

Abstract

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-48) grew up in Alabama, where women were expected to be meek, mild, and decorous. She was nothing of the sort. Zelda met her future husband, Scott, in her late teens, and the married pair became celebrity New York drunks, the life of any party. Zelda was Scott’s muse, but from her diaries she unwittingly supplied Scott with material for his novels, like This Side of Paradise. At times, he uplifted whole lines of prose. Zelda found this out, and commented, in a review of one of her husband’s books, that ‘plagiarism begins at home’. However, Zelda was an author in her own right, and spent much of her life trying to come out from behind the shadow of her husband’s success. Largely unappreciated in her own time, Zelda became a feminist icon in the 1970s.